He shrugs as if what he’s going to say next is going to piss me off. “So just continue to stare at her and have her disappear on campus again.”
“Unhelpful.”. The last person I should be taking advice from is Jacob, but he isn’t wrong, which only serves to make me even more angry.
“What are you going to do about that one chick?” he murmurs.
Without having to use her name, I know exactly who he’s talking about. I’m supposed to be dating another girl. A girl my parents have set out for me to marry. A girl who goes to this college, just like me. It’s complicated, but I try not to think about it. I don’t dream of this other girl. I don’t fantasize about her.
“Dorothy?” I ask.
“What a name that is,” he says, laughing. “What were her parents thinking?”
Shifting uncomfortably in my seat, I answer, “It’s a family name I guess.”
“You snooty rich people.” He pops a chip in his mouth and crunches down. “Of course, they want to carry on a legacy name. Anyway. Does this mean you’ll call off this future engagement? Because if you ask me, you’re letting your parents dictate who you spend the rest of your life with after you graduate.”
I flex my jaw, knowing he’s right. It’s because of my last relationship that they don’t trust me to make wise decisions anymore.
“I was never interested in her to begin with,” I admit. I was just going through the motions after a terrible heartbreak.
“So then, tell your parents no, and go after whoever this hottie is.”
“It’s not that simple,” I grumble under my breath.
“Sure it is. It’s a two-letter word.”
“You have no idea what it’s like to be me, do you?”
He lifts an eyebrow. “Good looks with a lot of money? No.”
I tighten my hold on my chip bag. “I don’t have a lot of money. I have an allowance to get me through college. It’s notlike I can tap into the family money whenever I want to.” Which is something my last girlfriend found out about and promptly left me after I fell hard for her. I was messed up for weeks, and after that, my parents picked someone out for me who would look good on their future and their empire’s future.
“Sure, sure,” he says around a chip.
I roll the tension from my neck. “Let’s talk about something else.”
Considering me carefully, he says, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you hung up on a girl. Not like that one chick.”
Jacob came into the picture at the tail end of my last relationship. He saw the part where I recovered from the heartache. Helped pull me out, actually, and showed me that there was hope for me with his jokes and teasing. That there were other fish in the sea and I’d find my place among the fish.
And I think I have.
I just have to figure out how to go about this. And that’s not the only hurdle I have to go through.
“Let me guess; you have some wise-ass joke about it,” I say, sneaking a careful glance in Sarah’s direction. They’re standing and getting ready to leave the courtyard. Panic rises in my throat, knowing that she’s going to disappear from my sight again, but I try to calm myself by taking a few deep breaths. I’ll find her again. I will. I just have to play my cards right.
Jacob shakes his head. “Nope. None. It was just an observation.”
“That’s rare,” I say, turning my focus back to him once Sarah and Ivy leave the premises and head back into a building, bookbags slung over their shoulder. My heart patters a different pattern, knowing she’s no longer in my line of sight.
He frowns as he considers himself. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”
Sighing, I change the subject. “When is your next class?”
Checking his watch, he grumbles under his breath and wads up his trash. He stands, and I stand with him, following him to the trash by the taco hut. “In ten minutes. I gotta get going.”
“Yeah, me too,” I admit as we throw our trash away.
Before he leaves, Jacob clears his throat. “What are you doing tonight?”
